Aspects of Teaching and Learning Phonetic Symbols
Aspects of Teaching and Learning Phonetic SymbolsThe teaching of pronunciation is described as "the Cinderella of language
teaching", i.e. she has never got to go to the ball. That tells the truth.
In contrast to those "princesses" — vocabulary, grammar, reading, writing
and speaking people usually think much of, this "humble lady" has long
been out of favour. But as a matter of fact, one's linguistic competence
depends in a certain measure on his pronunciation which, if is too bad to
communicate with other people, he will only be regarded as a failed
language learner. On the other hand, for an adult, it is not difficult to
enlarge the amount of vocabulary or enhance the knowledge of grammar. But
without a solid foundation of pronunciation at the early stage, it will be
beyond repair in case of fossilization. By this token, Teaching of
pronunciation deserves much more attention than we paid before.
This article ventures some personal ideas on the teaching of phonetic
symbols — the most basic element of pronunciation
I. Why do we have to learn phonetic symbols?
To learn or not to learn, that is not the question. The majority of
Chinese and foreign teachers think it is quite necessary.
In terms of teaching rules, learning phonetic symbols as early as possible
is a good way of reducing down the repetition as well as raising up the
memory of words . Those teachers are not baseless by saying that a large
number of students lag behind in Grade Two owing to their failure of
learning phonetic symbols in Grade One thus unable to expand their
vocabulary and improve their reading ability.
In aspect of teaching strategy, mastery of phonetic symbols at the initial
stage usually makes the students feel successful and confident because, in
a sense, they are alrea
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